Alternative Alchemy

Legend has it that back in the Dark Ages there were kings who spent fortunes on an effort to turn lead into gold. Even at that point in western science it was known that lead and gold are tantalizingly close in their chemical compositions, and the kings assumed that all that was needed to make up the slight difference was a vast amount of the taxpayers’ money.

A similar assumption seems to underlie the Obama administration’s energy policy, which seeks to turn wind, sunshine, algae, and anything else at hand into something as powerful and affordable as oil and coal. All that’s needed to achieve this transmutation, apparently, is several billion dollars more of federal funding.

With oil prices recently on the rise, and the public’s discontent rising at a commensurate pace, Obama flew his petroleum-powered jet to North Carolina on Wednesday to defend this notion. After assuring the crowd at a German-owned truck factory in Mount Holly that his policies have increased oil production in America, Obama called oil a “fuel of the past” and prophesied a glorious future of alternative energies and more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The part about his administration increasing domestic oil production simply isn’t true, as disgruntled oil producers around the country will attest. There has indeed been an increase in the amount of oil being pumped here, but it’s been on private lands beyond Obama’s control or from leases issued by previous administrations. The administration’s policy has been to keep almost all federal lands untapped, enforce a moratorium on Gulf drilling, and “slow-walk” new permits.

The part about the alternative energy-powered future might happen, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about it happening anytime soon. Even Obama’s Department of Energy’s can’t offer a more optimistic projection than 13 percent of America’s energy production coming from alternative sources by 2035, and history gives no reason to be hopeful that federal funding will help us get there.

The Solyndra debacle and the Chevy Volt fiasco are but two notable examples of the government’s “green” failures, and the big successes that the administration’s cheerleaders at The Hill cite are the re-organization of the bankrupt EnerDel company and that taxpayers will recover 70 percent of a loan to the Beacon Power Corporation’s bankrupt energy storage plant. The government has been at work on alternative energy sources since at least the ‘70s, when President Jimmy Carter set a goal of obtaining 20 percent of America’s energy from solar power by the year 2000, and the results have not been encouraging. To borrow a word from the alchemists’ lexicon, more federal money is not a panacea.

Which raises the question of why it has to be federal money. Anyone who does invent a power source that is less expensive and just as efficient as oil will become very, very wealthy as a result, and that should entice the smart money into the most promising avenues of research. The inevitable technological breakthrough might be discovered by government scientists who will be paid the same if they fail or succeed, or it might be found by private entities that will be rich if they succeed and broke if they don’t, but we’re inclined to bet on the latter. The people staking their own money will also be more careful in choosing which technologies to invest in, rather than governments, which always seem to wind up backing the biggest campaign contributors.

The alchemists’ failed experiments yielded some knowledge that later became useful, but they never did figure out how to turn lead into gold. Centuries later science did figure out how to do it, but not in a way that was less expensive than the price of gold. The modern day energy alchemists will probably provide some new science, too, but don’t expect that they’ll soon be able to turn wind, sunshine, algae, and whatever’s at hand into power. They might be able to provide alternative energy at a competitive price when oil gets to $600 a barrel, but the Obama administration hasn’t achieved that yet.

Then again, the price of gold is now $1,686 an ounce, while WTI crude oil is selling at a relatively cheap $106.41 a barrel, so perhaps the government would do better to invest in some old-fashioned alchemy.

 — Bud Norman